Dr KARL SHUKER

Zoologist, media consultant, and science writer, Dr Karl Shuker is also one of the best known cryptozoologists in the world. Author of such seminal works as Mystery Cats of the World (1989), The Lost Ark: New and Rediscovered Animals of the 20th Century (1993; greatly expanded in 2012 as The Encyclopaedia of New and Rediscovered Animals), In Search of Prehistoric Survivors (1995), and more recently Extraordinary Animals Revisited (2007), Dr Shuker's Casebook (2008), Karl Shuker's Alien Zoo: From the Pages of Fortean Times (2010), Cats of Magic, Mythology, and Mystery (2012), and Mirabilis: A Carnival of Cryptozoology and Unnatural History (2013), his many fans have been badgering him to join the blogosphere for years. The CFZ Blog Network is proud to have finally persuaded him to do so.

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Tuesday, 8 March 2016

THE YUKON BEAVER EATER, AND GROUND SLOTHS IN NEW ZEALAND?

Restoration
of Megatherium (Wikipedia/Public domain)

When we think of
sloths, we generally picture those famously sluggish, dog-sized, tree-dwelling
beasts that spend much of their time hanging upside-down from branches in
modern-day Central and South America. Millions of
years ago, however, there were several additional, very different morphological
types – of which the most famous and dramatic were the ground sloths.

Most of these
were primarily terrestrial, some were rather bovine in appearance but with
shaggy fur, and many were considerably larger than their arboreal relatives.
Although principally quadrupedal, ground sloths were capable of squatting erect
on their hind legs to browse upon high-level foliage, and their distribution
range included not only tropical mainland Latin America, but also North America as well as
various of the Caribbean islands.

There were four
separate taxonomic families containing ground sloths. The largest species were
the megatheriids, typified by Megatherium ('big beast') from the
Pleistocene of Patagonia, which attained the size of an elephant (recently
split from the megatheriids into their own taxonomic family are the
nothrotheriids). At the other extreme were the megalonychids, some being the
smallest of all ground sloths, but also including the ox-sized Megalonyx
('big claw'), which earned its name from the huge claw on the third toe of each
of its hind feet. This latter family also contains today's two-toed tree sloths.

Intermediate in
size between the above groups of ground sloth were the mylodontids - which are
of particular cryptozoological interest. For although the last representatives
of all types of ground sloth officially died out several millennia ago, reports
of mysterious creatures resembling these supposedly bygone beasts have emerged
from several different Neotropical locations in modern times - including in
particular some compelling evidence to suggest that Brazil may harbour a
species of living mylodontid, eluding scientific discovery yet well known to
the native people sharing its secluded jungle domain, referring to this cryptid
as the mapinguary.

Moreover, certain putative ground sloths living in
modern times have been reported from localities outside the Neotropics,
including the following pair of hitherto little-known examples.

THE SAYTOECHIN OR
YUKON BEAVER EATER

In September 1989,
the then recently-formed British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club (BCSCC)
was contacted by a Canadian First Nation member named Dawn Charlie concerning a
mysterious beast featuring in their oral traditions relating to Yukon's wildlife. The
beast in question was referred to as the saytoechin (which translates as
'beaver eater'), and was described as being bigger than even the biggest
grizzly bear, and feeding principally upon beavers, which it apparently
captured by flipping up their lodges and then seizing the exposed beavers
inside. When Native Americans living in the area were shown a book of extinct
mammals, they selected an illustration of a ground sloth as the saytoechin, and
the most recent reported sighting of one dates from the mid-1980s. As
documented in 1990 by BCSCC co-founder Prof. Paul LeBlond in #4 of the Club's
newsletter after interviewing Dawn Charlie, the details given by her concerning
this sighting are as follows:

The latest report was from Violet Johny, my husband’s
sister, who was fishing with her husband and her mother at the head of TatchunLake 4 or
5 years ago.An animal came out of the
woods, 8 or 9 feet high,
bigger than a grizzly bear.It was a
“saytoechin” and it was coming towards them.They panicked, fired a few shots over its head and finally managed to
get the motor going and took off.There
are other reports.There is also a
report that a white man shot one in a small lake in that area.Beaver eaters are supposed to live in the
mountainous area east of FrenchmanLake.

Although ground
sloths are generally thought of as tropical Latin (particularly South) American
creatures, before their official extinction at the end of the Pleistocene some
species had migrated northwards and had indeed established themselves in parts
of North America. At least five genera are currently
represented by fossils discovered in various locations here, including a single
species, Megaloynx jeffersonii, in Yukon.

So in terms of
zoogeography alone, a Yukon ground sloth is already known, but obviously a
living one is another matter entirely – as is the saytoechin's apparent dietary
proclivity for beavers. This is because according to traditional
palaeontological belief, all forms of terrestrial non-aquatic ground sloth were
exclusively herbivorous. Having said that: in 1996, Drs Richard Fariña and
Ernesto Blanco from the Universidad de la República in Montevideo, Uruguay,
published a thought-provoking if controversial paper in the Proceedings of
the Royal Society, in which they proposed that Megatherium could
have used its fearsome claws to overturn, stab, and kill glyptodonts as prey.

From analysing a
Megatherium skeleton, Fariña and Blanco discovered that its olecranon (the elbow
portion to which the triceps
muscle attaches) was very short. This adaptation is found in carnivores, and optimises
speed rather than strength. These researchers opined that this would have
enabled Megatherium to use its claws like daggers, and they suggested
that it may have commandeered kills made by the sabre-tooth Smilodon in order to
add nutrients to its diet (such behaviour is known as kleptoparasitic).
Moreover, based upon the estimated strength and mechanical
advantage of its biceps,
they proposed that Megatherium could have overturned adult glyptodonts as a means of
scavenging or hunting them.

However, this
proposal has not gained widespread acceptance. In particular, palaeontologist
Dr Paul S. Martin considers it "fanciful", noting that in terms of
their dentition, ground sloths lack the carnassials that characterise
predators, and that to suggest even that they were scavengers (let alone
predators) is a reach. In addition, ground sloth dung deposits studied by him
in Arizona's Grand Canyon and also in
caves in Nevada, New Mexico, and western Texas contained no
traces of bone. So far, therefore, at least as far as the palaeontological
world is concerned, the case for carnivorous ground sloths in the past (not to
mention in the present) has yet to be convincingly made.

Exquisite
vintage illustration of Megatherium, from Extinct Monsters - A
Popular Account of Some of the Larger Forms of Ancient Animal Life, 4th ed.,
1896, Reverend H.N. Hutchinson (public domain)

As for the
saytoechin: as discussed by Canadian cryptozoologist Sebastian Wang in a BCSCC
Newsletter article (fall 2006) documenting this little-known cryptid,
although the Native Americans selected a ground sloth from a book of extinct
mammals as resembling it there is little else that actually links the two creatures
directly. Other, less dramatic identities for it include an unusually large
grizzly bear or black bear, plus some cryptozoological ones, such as a bigfoot,
or even a surviving short-faced bear Arctodus or giant beaver Castoroides,
although the idea of a giant beaver habitually preying upon normal beavers does
not seem very likely. As far as I am aware, no specific search has ever been
made for the mystifying Yukon beaver eater,
so it is surely time for someone to rectify this oversight.

GROUNDS SLOTHS
ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN NEW ZEALAND?!

It was
cryptozoological archivist Richard Muirhead who kindly brought to my attention
what must surely be the most unexpected claim ever made regarding alleged
living ground sloths, which can be found in British retired submarine officer Gavin
Menzies's book 1421: The Year China Discovered the
World
(2002). In it, he claims that from 1421 to 1423, during China's Ming dynasty under the Yongle Emperor, the
fleets of Admiral Zheng He, commanded by the captainsZhou
Wen, Zhou Man,
Yang
Qing, and Hong Bao,
discovered the Northeast
Passage, the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica;
circumnavigated Greenland;
attempted to reach the North and South Poles; and circumnavigated the world a century
before before Ferdinand
Magellan carried out the first officially-recognised
circumnavigation. Not too surprisingly, mainstream historians do not agree with
his claims, but such matters lie outside the scope of this present book of
mine.

What does lie
within its scope, however, is Menzies's suggestion in his own book that on one of their ships the Chinese took aboard
some mylodontids captured in Patagonia but that upon reaching New Zealand in c.1421 a pair escaped when the ship was wrecked in Dusky
Sound in Fjordland at the southwestern tip of South Island.
Moreover, in 1831 a ship
from Sydney, Australia, visited Dusky Sound, where two sailors from the ship saw an
animal that according to Menzies fitted the description of a ground sloth.

If so, this would indicate that the escaped mylodontids from
the 1400s had not only survived in New Zealand but must also have established a
population that was still in existence there four centuries later – always assuming
of course that the beast seen was indeed a ground sloth, which is a massive
assumption to say the least, and even more so when an independent source of
information concerning this latter cryptid is examined (see below). Also, the
wrecked ship was not Chinese, but an English vessel called the Endeavour,
and was wrecked in 1795, not 1421.

A mylodontid depicted on a postage stamp issued by Cambodia in 1994 (public domain)

Further information concerning this very strange state of
affairs was presented in Robyn Jenkin's fascinating book New Zealand
Mysteries (1970), which contained the following detailed account of the
sailors' mystery beast sighting:

Even more bizarre was a story, also
reported to the Collector of Customs in Sydney when the Sydney Packet returned home in
1831. One of the ship's gangs which had been stationed at Dusky Sound told of
the discovery of an enormous animal of the kangaroo species.

The men had been boating in a cove
in some quiet part of the inlet where the rocks shelved from the water's edge
up to the bushline. Looking up they saw a strange animal perching at the edge
of the bush nibbling the foliage. It stood on its hind legs, the lower part of
its body curving into a thick pointed tail, and when they took note of the height
it reached against the trees, allowing five feet for the tail, they estimated
it stood nearly thirty feet in height!

The men were to windward of the animal
and were able to watch it feeding for some time before it spotted them. They
watched it pull down a heavy branch with comparative ease, turn it over and
tilt it up to reach the leaves it wanted. When it finally saw them, the animal
stood watching the men for a short time, then made one almighty leap from the edge
of the bush towards the water's edge. There it landed on all fours but
immediately stood erect before making another great leap into the water. The
men were able to measure the first jump and found it covered
twenty yards. They watched the animal plough its way down the Sound at tremendous
speed, its wake extending from one side of the Sound to the other.

Here again one is tempted to think
the rum was talking, and for an Australian going away from home for months on
end, what other animal would stir the imagination but a kangaroo? But how much
more romantic to think that perhaps they really had seen some prehistoric
animal living out its days in the remote fastnesses of the West Coast Sounds.

Romantic it may
be, but the mundane reality is that no ground sloth is suspected to have
behaved in the highly dramatic manner ascribed to the creature described above,
or to have attained its colossal dimensions, which even dwarf those of the
mighty Megatherium. In any case, as no comparable accounts appear to
have been filed in this dual-island country since that one, it is surely safe
to say that if a living ground sloth is indeed discovered one day, it will not
be anywhere in New Zealand!

My sincere thanks
to Sebastian Wang for making available to me his detailed BCSCC Newsletter
article on the Yukon beaver eater,
and to Richard Muirhead for bringing to my attention the remarkable history of New Zealand's alleged
ground sloths.

This
ShukerNature article is excerpted from my forthcoming book, Still In Search Of Prehistoric Survivors.

19th-Century
engraving depicting the creation of the CrystalPalaceMegatherium
(public domain)

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